COLE CASE
When We Did Believe in Magic and We Didn’t Die
New Paintings
November 15 – December 24, 2008
Opening reception Saturday November 15th 5-8pm

Western Project is proud to present the second solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist, Cole Case. With degrees in both fine art and English, Case is a unique narrative artist. This new body of work is comprised of images from his years in Southern California; an iconography of memory – one man’s travelogue of Los Angeles history. Whether under the influence of 17th Century Dutch still life painting or Manet’s, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère or The Arcade Fire, the artist draws together unexpected objects into scenes rich with the palette of contemporary life. It is a kind of autobiographical Pop with reductive compositions, lush with detail.  His peculiar sense takes the past and the present as co-conspirators, creating images as eternal thoughts. Whether depicting a Hollywood cemetery as an idyllic Eden, or an empty, fire-red table at El Coyote, he describes an emphatic kind of living, each an ode to life. Case’s work presses beyond irony with a passion of the fives senses exemplified in the scratched, rubbed and painted surfaces; each a feast of oil paint. By his hand, the Hollywood Bowl is a luminous monument in a sea of cell phone lights. Akin to artists disparate as Philip Guston and Matt Groening, Case proves every image is not what it appears to be; each is a complex and loaded tale.